Watch Over Me (24 page)

Some people stay stuck in a moment for the rest of their lives. Like Beryl. She’s about my age, if I were alive. One Beryl comes and goes, between her house in Glen Avich and her daughter’s house with her grandsons in Aberdeen. She’s been working in a factory for forty years, watching her daughter grow up, going on the occasional holiday and growing old like we all do. But since I died, I can see the other Beryl. The thirty-year-old woman running out into the street, invisible hands holding her back, eyes wild as she sees her three-year-old son lying in the middle of the road, no more breath in him.

They often cross each other, the two Beryls. One coming home from the supermarket, locking the car, holding a bag of groceries, brushing past the frozen thirty-year-old Beryl who screams silently and falls on the ground, over and over and over again.

I think I was stuck for a bit myself, when I lost the baby boy in between my children, but I managed to be whole again after a while. Jamie’s birth healed me.

Beryl will be like that until the day she dies but I know Fiona won’t. I know that her love is deep and real, and that although her heart is broken now, it will heal one day and the only trace of what happened will be a scar … It will still be painful, it will hurt every time the memories come back to haunt her, but she’ll get through it.

But I still hope that however Fiona decides to shape her future, she finds the courage to bring the little plant into the light before it fades and dies, because I know that’s what she wants.

I believe we all only love once. Except sometimes, the one we are meant to love is not the one we think. Sometimes we lose someone, we think our life is over and we get frozen in the moment of despair. But it can turn out that, in spite of all that anguish, our true soulmate is actually still out there. Life can give us another chance – once the one we thought was our soulmate is gone, the real one comes along.

Sometimes, though, the one we lost
is
the one we were meant to love and we spend the rest of our lives trying to accept, to adapt, to make do. Trying to pretend that friendship, companionship, lust, children, work, whatever, can replace the once-ina-lifetime love. It doesn’t really work, not completely, but a life like that can still be happy.

I look around me and I wonder who’s hiding a lost love, whether in bitterness or in acceptance, trying to make the best of what they have. I wonder who never met their true love. You see, since I’m dead, I don’t believe in coincidences anymore, I see fate writing all the harmonies of the symphony of life, and us playing our little parts, or leading parts, in a way that’s never random. I see fate’s web superimposed on our reality, a million tiny connections and paths that we unknowingly walk along. Every turn we take opens up a different path in front of us, and choice after choice, we get exactly where we are meant to be. But sometimes people become so lost that they need a bit of guidance. That is when they call out, and we listen.

Janet wasn’t Jamie’s soulmate, even if he thought so at the time. Tom wasn’t Eilidh’s. James was my once-in-a-lifetime and Fraser is Shona’s. And Silke? Is she Fiona’s soulmate?

I don’t know yet and I might not be around long enough to know. Other ghosts will be here after me to read the stories of Glen Avich, in this parallel world we inhabit, a world of signs and whispers and memories, where all the thin, nearly inaudible voices that are lost to the living sound like screams to us and get to be heard. We are the ones who are meant to listen to the words unspoken.

The holidays were drawing to an end. I’d spent most of the last few days sitting lazily in front of the fire, watching the black branches of the trees across the road making a lace against the sky, everything quiet, everything asleep.

Around me, Peggy watching TV or knitting a wee outfit for her cousin’s new granddaughter, down south … the laptop beeping once in a while, as Harry and I chatted via email … occasional visitors, mainly distant relatives, home for the holidays, bringing Roses and Celebrations and staying for tea before they went ‘up the road’, back to wherever their lives took them, away from Glen Avich.

Every morning, the ground shone with frost, the grass matted down, silvery and crunchy underfoot. By early afternoon, the morning frost had disappeared but the evening one was on its way already. The air started turning again, chilly and thin, a hint of darkness in the sky. The short, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them winter days.

Since the sweet, maddening, perfect kiss on Hogmanay, everything in my life had been suspended – painful memories of the past, decisions for the future, the strange relationship with Jamie – everything was frozen and waiting, just like the land was. I knew that this peaceful state couldn’t last forever but still, I was enjoying the moment, enjoying every day as it came, like a string of pearls, one after the other.

One day, I had the house all to myself and I felt it was the right time to take another step towards freedom.

With shaking hands, I called him.

Thank God, it’s ringing. It’d be awful to try and muster the courage to phone him back again and go through all that hands sweating, heart in mouth, not breathing ordeal.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me.’

‘Eilidh …’ He sounded different.

‘Are you ok?’

‘No, I’m not ok.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh, Eilidh. Please let me see you. We need to talk.’

‘Tom, we can talk for days, it won’t change things. What’s there to say anyway?’

‘I made a terrible mistake. She’s gone. You’ve no idea how my life has changed. She isn’t … she wasn’t
you
.’

‘She was good enough to keep you warm while I went through hell!’ I blurted out and regretted it immediately. There was no point. The cut had been made between us, so deep it was irreparable. It couldn’t be stitched, it couldn’t be undone. There was no ‘Tom and Eilidh’ anymore.

‘Do you care for me at all, Tom? Do I still matter to you?’

‘Yes! I want to give us another chance … I want to make it work.’

‘If you care for me, you need to let me go. I can never go back to Southport, I can never go back to my old life.’

‘We’re not tied to Southport! We can move. I can come up to Scotland, get a job in Aberdeen or Edinburgh …’

‘Tom.’

A moment of silence, a deep breath.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you going to help me? Are you going to contact a lawyer and we’ll see what we need to do to get a divorce? Or are you going to stall us?’ My voice was shaking.

‘I don’t want …’

‘Tom, listen to me. I’m barely out of the woods here. I can function again, you know? I get up in the morning and I’m not in despair, for the first time in years, apart from when I was pregnant.’ Tears sprang to my eyes. I still had tears left then, thought I’d cried them all by now. I must have filled a loch by now. Loch Eilidh.

‘Please help me now. You need to let me go. Please.’

Silence.

‘I wish I could say no. I wish I could insist and insist until maybe I break you and you come back. But I don’t want to break you, I want to help you like you asked me … but, Eilidh, I can’t agree to this if I don’t see you once more. We must talk face to face … you can’t hide up there …’

‘I’m not hiding. Contrary to what you might think, people actually have real lives here, too, just like in Southport or London.’

‘Ok, ok, sorry … I mean you can’t hide from me. You need to see me and talk to me …’

‘I’ll do that. Come up. When you’re ready. I’ll tell you to your face that our marriage is over.’

‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve regretted the whole Carol thing …’

Carol. So that was her name. I wondered if she loved him. I wondered if she was heartbroken. I hoped so. I hated her. I wish I didn’t, I wish I was better than that. But I hated her.

‘It wasn’t …
Carol
.’ Her name was like bile in my mouth. ‘It was us. Both you and me. Need to go now. I’ll phone you …’

‘This weekend? I’ll drive up Friday night …’

For a second, I couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to pass out. Panic. But I knew I had to face it … I had to face him.

‘Not this weekend, I … I can’t. The following one, if you’re not too busy.’

‘Too busy? Are you crazy? I’ll be up in two weeks time, then. Your aunt’s house?’

‘Yes. You can get a room in the Green Hat. The number is in my address book, by the phone in the hall …’

I could see it, in my mind’s eye. The hall, the house. All that I used to know.

‘Will do. See you soon, Eilidh.’

‘Yes. Bye.’

I was glad. I was so glad it was nearly over. We’d separate, then divorce officially, then no more Tom. I was glad.

Then why was I crying so hard I thought my heart would break?

I looked up and out of the window. In the space of a few minutes, while I wasn’t looking, the air itself had turned white, the sky had given way and innumerable little white flakes were falling. Everything grew quiet. I sat and watched the snow in silent grief.

A Christmas card? Janet didn’t do Christmas. Every year, she puts money in Maisie’s account and I get the statement in the post, that’s her Christmas card to Maisie.

I was always happier when Janet was out of the way. A part of me always worried that she’d come back for Maisie. I worried so much that I even went to see a lawyer in Aberdeen, just to know where I stood. Thankfully, the lawyer reassured me that no judge would ever take her away from me or from Glen Avich.

Still.

I fought the temptation to throw the card into the fire. If Janet was trying to make contact with Maisie, I couldn’t hide it from her. What would Maisie say if one day she found out I’d hidden or destroyed her mum’s letters? That I hampered her mother’s attempts to get in touch, to make amends? It was addressed to me, though, not Maisie.

I knew I had to read it. I ripped the envelope open.

    Dear Jamie,

    I just wanted to let you know that I’m moving to New York. I’ll still look after Maisie financially …

Look after Maisie? She never looked after Maisie. Her idea of ‘looking after’ is quite different to mine. Well, to the rest of the world’s, really.

    … but my contact details will change. Actually, I’d rather you didn’t contact me at all. I’m getting married and I’d rather keep this part of my life a secret. I know I can trust you.

       Merry Christmas,

       Janet.

And Merry Christmas to you. From me and from your secret daughter.

The snowfall had been long and heavy for the first time in years. By the time Maisie was back at school, a thick, white blanket was covering everything. Every morning, we’d wake up in a magical landscape and nearly every afternoon, a bit more snow fell and kept falling into the night.

I was so tense and anxious over the conversation I’d had with Tom, I often couldn’t sleep. I sat up half the night, watching the snow falling, falling, falling. I was counting the days to him coming up, not because I wanted to see him, but because I dreaded it.

Two weeks to go.

‘Can we go and show Daddy now?’

Maisie was putting her jotter into her bag, carefully. Hers was the best piece of work in the whole class, it had earned a sticker and a ‘well done’ in red pen. Maisie had asked if she could take it home to show her dad and Mrs Hill had agreed, with the promise that the jotter would be back the next day.

‘Well, he’s working now. Maybe we can show him later on, when he comes home?’

Maisie’s face fell.

‘But I don’t want to wait!’ she exclaimed, looking at me with puppy eyes. She knew it worked on me, every time.

‘Ok then, let’s walk up to the workshop but we’ll only be five minutes, your dad is very busy.’

‘Ok!’ she said, jumping up and down in joy.

We walked up in the freezing afternoon, under a white sky. The snow was crunching underneath our feet and all noises were muffled. I was enjoying every step, it was like walking in a fairy tale. Maisie was blowing gently, to see her breath turn into a wee white cloud. She was wrapped up to within an inch of her life, her pink hat pulled down on her forehead and her scarf up around her chin, so that only her blue-grey eyes and her cold, crimson cheeks were visible.

We could see Jamie from the window, sitting at the drawing table, his back to us. Maisie tapped the glass gently and Jamie turned, his face lighting up as he saw us.

We walked round to the door and inside. It was my first time in Jamie’s workshop. It was brightly lit, as the muted winter light wasn’t enough for Jamie to work with. All around us lay Jamie’s beautiful pieces, from everyday objects, like fireguards and little gates, to tables covered in exquisite jewellery and keepsakes.

Maisie ran to Jamie and gave him a cuddle.

‘Look, Daddy!’ she said, taking the jotter out of her bag.